Bad timing. Some excerpts of what was on the radio as I was doing some errands today:
.... Yeah, so it’s important to understand, I think, that fires have transformed significantly just in the past couple of decades. In California, 18 of the 20 largest fires in recorded history have burned since the year 2000. And this is a trend around the world. So scientists have recently invented new terms for this and mega fire is one of them. A mega fire by the numbers is a that burns over 100,000 acres. But it’s also characterized by rates of spread, by the amount of vegetation it kills. And so back just a.....
... A generation ago, when hotshots began being, so hotshots were founded in the 1940s. One of the first crews was actually the Los Padres hotshot crew that I joined. And just a generation ago they’d spent about maybe 10% of the time fighting fires and then 90% of time doing other sorts of forest maintenance work. But with the onset of climate change and the sorts of fires we’ve seen, it’s totally flipped. So. It’s really by the time you get activated as a crew in May, you’re out fighting wildfires and you don’t stop until the end of the institutional fire season, which is November. But really we know that fire season is sort of a misnomer now because it’s more of a fire year. So.....
... The flip side of that though, and I guess the dark side of it, is that because a lot of the really difficult things in Hopshot’s personal lives that they deal with, such as lack of health care, such as chronic health effects of the work, and such as their inability to support themselves if they get injured, a lot of that comes from the fact that they’re a federal resource. So the state firefighters in California and the municipal firefighters in california, they’re actually quite well compensated and they’re quite well taken care of if they got injured. But it’s been really hard to pass legislation to provide the same...
....Krys Boyd: [00:40:34] What range of beliefs did you find your colleagues held about climate change?
Jordan Thomas: [00:40:41] You know, one of the really fascinating and most fulfilling and fun things about the crew is that you basically find all the fault lines of American society running through the crew. You have all these different people. You have surfers, you have ranchers, is you have, you have immigrants, you got people from Mexico, you people from Nicaragua, you have academics, you had all sorts of people. But these liberal conservative lines don’t really cut across. The crew in the same way as across society. So I think it’s important to distinguish different kinds of climate denial. I think that there’s a real difference between like the Koch brothers and wealthy billionaires or even like comfortable suburbanites who live in AC, who maybe say climate change is happening, but we shouldn’t do anything about it or we can’t do everything about it, which is its own form of denial of science, which really just serves to prop up the fossil fuel industry outside of what science says we should be doing. While among hotshots, there’s a different form of engagement with climate change, which is a sense of often institutional distrust, because a lot of hotshots have been somewhat abandoned by our public institutions, even as they work for them. They know that they might not be taken care of if they get hurt. They knew that they’re not paid very well. So there’s real distrust among a lot people. And that distrust might not translate into denying climate change, but it is easily harnessed and captured by.....
... Jordan Thomas: [00:44:49] Yeah, so I think that the most important thing that we need to keep in mind is that we to stop burning fossil fuels as quickly as possible. There is no other strategy that will work if climate change continues at its current rate. Now, climate change and forest management are often pitted against each other when we’re talking about where these fires come from, but they always come from both. And there is no forest management strategy that will be effective anywhere if we keep burning fossil fuels at our ...
think.kera.org |
